French Audiobooks & eBooks

Explore French offers an increasing range of French ebooks and audiobooks tailored for learners of French. Why are our audiobooks so special and so efficient for learning French?

All conjugated verbs from the texts are coloured, and each colour tells you which tense the verb is conjugated with

Key vocabulary is translated into English in the margin

E-bookscome with the audio so you can listen to what you read and practise both your reading and listening skills in French

Each book is partitionned into sections of a resonnable length so you can read one section a day or a week and go at your pace

Tailored for learners of French

Improve your reading skills in French

Reading authentic French may be challenging, but our French audiobooks are designed to help you with what causes difficulty to French learners, namely the vocabulary and the tenses. Don't forget that you don't have to understand 100% of what you read anyway! Our French ebooks and audiobooks include short stories, tales, fables and essays so that you can get familiar with different writing styles, topics and vocabulary items.

Improve your listening skills in French

Recordings are made at a normal-slow speed in order to train your ear to listening to authentic French. Indeed, listening to spoken French that is excessively slow would not help you. Why? Because that is not how people speak and you would be lost when listening to authentic French at normal speed. We recommend you listen to the track (as much as you like) before reading each text for the first time.

Expand your French vocabulary

For each text we provide you with a lot of vocabulary, which you are not obliged to refer to. It is indeed better to try to figure out the meaning of a word or phrase from the context before looking it up. Words for which a translation is given are in bold in the text, and sometimes a synonym in French is given instead of the English. By learning French vocabulary in context you will remember it better.

Practise all French tenses in context

All conjugated verbs from the texts are coloured so you can know at a glance which French tense they are using. Compound tenses (those using être/avoir) are underlined and use the same colour as their related simple tense. For instance, "j'ai" (red = présent) and "j'ai eu" (red= passé composé). By practising French tenses in context thanks to this device you will understand their use and functioning better.

Library of French ebooks & audiobooks

The Explore French library

Our library of French e-books/audiobooks is divided into four shelves, namely "short stories", "tales", "fables" and "essays". The range of books is increasing progressively and we are happy to receive your suggestions about the books you would like to have added.

Want to try our audiobooks for free? That's possible! Just set up an account for free and click HEREto access a FREE sample chapter from Le Horla, by Maupassant!

Subscription plans

By becoming a Premium Member of Explore French, you get full access to all the e-books + audiobooks from the library and you are free to print the texts if convenient. We just remind you that this material is under copyright and for personal use only.

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Short stories

Guy de Maupassant

Le Horla

The Horla is a short horror story. In the form of a journal, the narrator, an upper-class, unmarried, bourgeois man, conveys his troubled thoughts and feelings of anguish...

Guy de Maupassant

Regret

Monsieur Saval is an old bachelor, alone, with nobody about him. One day, as he thinks about the only woman he ever loved, he wonders whether he didn't miss the only opportunity he had to be happy...

Jean Giono

L'homme qui plantait des arbres

The Man Who Planted Trees tells the story of one shepherd's long and successful singlehanded effort to re-forest a desolate valley in the foothills of the Alps in Provence...

Voltaire

Memnon

Memnon one day took it into his head to become a great philosopher. "To be perfectly happy," said he to himself, "I have nothing to do but to divest myself entirely of passions; and nothing is more easy, as everybody knows"...

Arthur Cravan

André Gide

Published in Maintenant magazine, this short story narrates how Arthur Cravan took advantage of his family relationship with Oscar Wilde to meet André Gide. Cravan describes their encounter...

Nicolas Machiavel

Nouvelle très plaisante du démon qui prit femme

In The Devil Takes Wife, the princes of Hell plan to send archdevil Belfagor to earth to find why all men state women as the cause of their damnation...

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Le Petit prince

The Little Prince is a poetic tale in which a pilot stranded in the desert meets a young prince fallen to Earth from a tiny asteroid. The story is philosophical and includes social criticism, remarking on the strangeness of the adult world...(coming soon)

Oscar Wilde

Le fantôme de Canterville

The Canterville Ghost narrates the story of a family who moves to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead nobleman, who killed his wife and was starved to death by his wife's brothers...(coming soon)

Tales

Grimm

Cendrillon

A wealthy gentleman's wife lays on her deathbed and called her only daughter to her bedside, asking her to remain good. The widower married another woman, who had two cruel and wicked daughters...

Grimm

Le Prince Grenouille

The Frog Prince tells the story of a spoiled princess that reluctantly befriends the Frog Prince, which she met after dropping a gold ball into a pond...

Grimm

Boucle d'Or

Goldilocks and the Three Bears tells the story of a young girl who enters the forest home of three bears whilst they are away. She sits in their chairs, eats some of their porridge, and falls asleep in one of their beds. But soon, the bears return...

Charles Perrault

Le Petit chaperon rouge

The Little Red Riding Hood tells the story of a girl called after her red hooded cape. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sickly grandmother and meets a wolf...

Charles Perrault

Le Chat botté

Puss in Boots is a French-Italian tale about a cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master.

Charles Perrault

Barbe bleue

Blue Beard tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors.

Fables

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Corbeau et le Renard

The Fox and the Crow is a fable by Jean de la Fontaine. In the fable, a crow has found a piece of cheese and retired to a branch to eat it. A fox, wanting it for himself, start flattering the crow...

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Lièvre et la Tortue

The Tortoise and the Hare tells the story of a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. Tired of the Hare's boastful behaviour, the Tortoise challenges him to a race...

Jean de la Fontaine

La Cigale et la Fourmi

The Ant and the Grasshopper describes how a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant when winter comes and is refused...

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Loup et l'Agneau

The Wolf and the Lamb tells the story of a wolf that comes upon a lamb and, in order to justify taking its life, accuses it of various misdemeanours, all of which the lamb proves to be impossible.

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Chêne et le Roseau

The Oak and the Reed describes the contrasting behaviour of an oak, which trusts in its strength to withstand the storm and is blown over, and a reed that 'bends with the wind' and so survives.

Jean de la Fontaine

La Poule aux oeufs d'or

The Hen and the Golden Eggs tells the story of a hen, that laid a golden egg everyday, and its unsatisfied master, willing to find a way to become even richer.

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Pot de terre et le Pot de fer

The Clay Pot and the Iron Pot tells the story of an iron pot that proposes a journey together to a clay pot, which is only persuaded by the stronger pot's offer to protect him.

Jean de la Fontaine

Le Rat de ville et le Rat des champs

The Town Rat and the Country Rat tells the story a country rat that invites a country rat home. But their delicious meal is soon disturbed by dogs...

Jean de la Fontaine

La Grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le Bœuf

The Frog that Wished to be as Big as the Ox tells the story of a frog that tries to inflate itself to the size of an ox, but bursts in the attempt...

Essays

Marquis de Sade

La Vérité

The Truth is a philosophical poem followed by notes composed by D.A.F. de Sade around 1777. In that poem Sade expresses his views about morals, God and Nature, as well as religion and its origins.

Marquis de Sade

Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man expresses the author's atheism by having a dying man tell a priest about what he views as the mistakes of a pious life.

Immanuel Kant

Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ?

What Is Enlightenment? is a 1784 essay in which German philosopher Immanuel Kant analyses the lack of Enlightenment as people's inability to think for themselves due not to their lack of intellect, but lack of courage.